command line

Considering how much the command line is an integral part of the developer's workflow, it should not be thought overly difficult or tedious to learn.

At one time I avoided it myself, but one day began teaching myself ways to make the difficult as easy as it should be. I got over the hurdle, and you can too. It was worth investing my time to increase my command line comfort-level, and I am going to share a few tips and resources that I found helpful in this post.

The intended reader is the type who typically avoids the command line, or perhaps uses it occasionally but not as a regular or essential tool.

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Whilst attending a local meet-up last year in Nottingham, UK, my friends and I were introduced to the concept of NodeSchool. NodeSchool workshops are small applications which run in the terminal and exist to teach you various topics related to Node and JavaScript. They range from teaching you the basics of JavaScript, all the way through to dealing with C++ extensions.

I had great fun and the workshops were really cool - you select an exercise, read the problem and start coding. Each exercise explains concepts and links to resources. Once you have written a solution to the problem, you invoke the workshop with your solution. Your solution is then ran and information regarding your success (or failure!) is printed to the terminal.

I'm a PHP developer by trade - the next day I thought to myself: is there something similar for PHP? There must be something similar for PHP? Turns out there wasn't!

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